Monday, 20 June 2011

Lisa has been after a 'dutch' bike for quite some time now- after a recent trip to London (where she saw beautiful bike wherever she looked) she spent the afternoon on Ebay looking for a local bargain. We've looked before but to be honest there are very few bargains to be had on ebay and usually anything vaguely swoopy gets very expensive very quickly. Oddly when she looked this time she found a bike and it was just down the way in Kenilworth, it only had a few minutes left so she bid on it and won it for the princely sum of £20.

To be honest, at £20 I wasn't expecting very much, a further conversation with the owner revealed that since getting a puncture last year it had lived outside( through the winter) leaning on a woodpile waiting for someone to fix it. Anyway, when i picked it up it looked like this:

Complete with cobwebs!

A poke around revealed rotten cables, seized gears, ruined tyres and a broken seat, wherever chrome had been there was now a healthy smattering of rust and flakey chrome- on the upside all the bearing were fine as were the brakes and the frame and paintwork just needed a wipedown.

So I spent the day today removing the broken bits, cleaning rust, fixing puctures and putting it all back together again- now it looks like this: